That's not a balanced opinion. That's just throwing shit into the crowd to see a reaction. If you really believe the stuff that you said, then explain why you think it's disfunctional and then we can have a discussion about it - maybe we'll even agree on some points! But otherwise you're just noise at best and provocator at worst.
That was simply zero information about the nursing home situation in Spain and plain old (you should guess where it comes from) political internal ethno-supremacism.
Meanwhile in the real world, for instance, I live next to a nursing home with 100 cases (6 deaths so far), 35 of them workers, that has been transformed into a state field hospital with support of all authorities and the military after the business asked for help. That's Santa Elena, Torrent.
This illustrates why isolating old people at special facilities as some luminaries have been advising for is an absurd plan.
Other people are saying that the reason there's more deaths in Italy than other countries is because in Italy, there's sharing living spaces by the elderly and the young. An old folks home (I suppose that's what is meant by "nursing home") is kinda the definition of segregating the elderly. Sounds like that doesn't help - because even segregated living environments have enough interliving. Old folk need to get food and medicine and it's not retired people in the shops.
Yes, retirement home. The idea is problematic (wishful thinking actually) because you can't guarantee that people providing care there aren't infected. They might be asymptomatic or incubating. You can test them, but I don't think you can do that every day and then that such testing equals perfect filtering. Once it's inside isolation simply doesn't work.
It's certainly not that you're supposed to only say popular stuff. But if you're going to say something unpopular and inflammatory, the burden is on you to do it in a way that isn't destructive of ensuing discussion. If you just post it as raw flamebait and start fires, that damages the container here, which is already fragile. The site guidelines are designed to help us all protect against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In a way, the one who has a contrarian (a.k.a. unpopular minority) view has a greater responsibility—not morally, but practically. If you know some truth that most people don't, that has much greater potency than most information, and you're responsible for how you handle it. If you act like a cowboy and just blare it at people, they will seize up and become less receptive, which discredits the truth and leaves its cause worse off than it was before. So the community interest (not to be destroyed by flamewars) and your personal interest (to express something unpopular in a way that can be heard) actually coincide.
>All ideas are worth discussing, even if only to explain why they are not going to be implemented.
The aforementioned idea has been given the discussion it deserves, and has been rejected by the community as not providing anything of intellectual merit worth the effort of discussing further.
Not all ideas are worth discussing at length or of being taken seriously. If what you want is a "free market" of discussion (which Hacker News isn't, anyway) then you should accept that the community will value some ideas more than others.
You can read everything that gets posted here, including all [flagged] and [dead] posts. Just turn on "showdead" in your profile.
The only exceptions are outright-deleted comments, and we never do that except when the author asks us to. (Exception to the exception: once or twice a decade, we've had to delete something for legal reasons.)
A community is defined by a common set of values and cultural norms, which are a means of censoring those of outgroups in order to maintain a cohesive identity. People censor themselves constantly in order to stay within the boundaries of the law and the norms of public decency.
An online community which has a specific purpose by definition censors content which falls outside that purpose. Hell, the fact that we can't post illegal content is, itself, a form of censorship.
Not everything is, or should be, /b/. Although that site censors as well.
choosing what not to say isn't censorship. Censorship is when the someone with power forces you to refrain from saying something - not just in a particular forum, but in any effective way. This place tells you "if you want to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, consider twitter or wordpress". Censorship is when the government tells you "if you want to to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, please consider the gulag or child porn charges". The difference is stark.
Diluting words of meaning doesn't help maintain free speech. It helps destroy it. If we don't know what free speech is, we can't defend it.
(The fact that you can't post illegal content is a form of censorship. But that's not hackernews censoring you, it's the government. The fact that some content is illegal is literally the definition of censorship.)
>Censorship is when the someone with power forces you to refrain from saying something - not just in a particular forum, but in any effective way.
Choosing what not to say based on a fear of the consequences of that speech means that society, or whatever group you're communicating with, has exercised some form of influence or social authority over your speech, which is censorship. The oft-expressed axiom that "The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins" is censorship. Who are you, or anyone, to say where my rights begin and end?
>This place tells you "if you want to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, consider twitter or wordpress". Censorship is when the government tells you "if you want to to spread certain ideas on the internet from the comfort of your chair, please consider the gulag or child porn charges".
And the consensus on Hacker News seems to be that those are perfectly equivalent, that a platform rejecting certain kinds of speech or users being told what sort of speech is acceptable and what isn't inevitably leads to Orwellian fascism. Terms of service and codes of conduct are routinely considered censorship. Amazon banning the sale of Mein Kampf is censorship. Twitter banning anyone for any reason is censorship. Youtube not showing extremist videos in recommendations is censorship. Why is there suddenly a grey area where there never was before?
>Diluting words of meaning doesn't help maintain free speech. It helps destroy it. If we don't know what free speech is, we can't defend it.
Attempting to "thought police" the meaning of words in such a prescriptivist manner is censorship. Who are you to say what words mean? When I use a word, it means precisely what I intend it to mean, no more, no less.
Government censorship is one form of censorship... and the only form of censorship relevant to the first amendment, but "censorship" itself is a much broader and more complex phenomenon.
